Not many startup entrepreneurs can use a 120-year track record as a recruiting tool, but Tad Edwards can.

He is the great-great-grandson of Gen. Albert Gallatin Edwards, who started a brokerage business that remained under family management for four generations. Tad, whose full name is Benjamin F. Edwards IV, has put the family name on a new firm that he hopes will be as durable.

The name — along with Tad Edwards' reputation and the team he has built — is already attracting recruits from the family's old firm, now known as Wells Fargo Advisors after going through two mergers in a little over a year.

A five-person group in Springfield, Mo., joined Benjamin F. Edwards & Co. in August and an eight-person office in White Plains, N.Y., opened this week. All 13 new employees, like all 25 at the headquarters in Clayton, formerly worked for A.G. Edwards & Sons.

Tad Edwards, 54, never ran A.G. Edwards, but he did work there for 31 years. He's careful not to say anything critical of Wells Fargo, but he does offer a clear alternative. "We think people are attracted to a private, entrepreneurial firm that's got the deep roots of generations, where people can take care of their clients and where there's a fun culture," he says.

The word "fun" was a favorite of his father, Benjamin F. Edwards III, who built the family firm to national prominence while cultivating a reputation for customer service. Ben's version of the Golden Rule — treat customers well, treat employees well, and profits will take care of themselves — is in place at the new firm, too, Tad Edwards says.

The Clayton office is full of family mementoes, including a few pieces from Ben Edwards'

beloved collection of Chinese porcelain. The firm's structure retains several other A.G. Edwards hallmarks, including an aversion to debt and an absence of proprietary financial products.

Not everything is the same, however. Rather than build a back-office infrastructure, the new firm clears trades through Pershing Securities. Tad Edwards also might offer brokers a "very modest transition package;" his father flatly refused to pay recruiting bonuses.

Edwards says he has no growth targets, but it's safe to assume that the first two branch offices won't be the last. New recruits may not all come from Wells Fargo, either; Edwards has had inquiries from brokers at a variety of firms.

Charles "Chip" Roame, a brokerage industry consultant with Tiburon Strategic Advisors in Tiburon, Calif., thinks Edwards' concept may have wide appeal.

"Your opportunity is to get other like-minded brokers, who maybe grew up at Merrill Lynch or Smith Barney or somewhere else," says Roame. "Those firms have all been upended, and none of them really have the cultures they used to have. My hypothesis would be that after getting a good number of A.G. Edwards guys, he'll be able to get a good number of brokers from firms that looked like A.G. Edwards at one time."

Boutique brokerages have been growing at the expense of big Wall Street houses, but most of the growth comes as veteran brokers set up their own shops. Edwards is asking those same veterans to remain employees rather than become business owners, and that's an untested model, Roame says.

Will it succeed? A few months is too soon to tell, but the Edwards family has made a lot of friends in 120 years. Edwards certainly will have plenty of people rooting for him.